Familiar feeling: Golden Knights turn it up a gear to start playoffs with win

By Case Keefer (contact)

Tuesday, April 23, 2024 | 2 a.m.

DALLAS — Tomas Hertl called it “great” as his trademark grin stuck to his face for at least 30 minutes after the game. Mark Stone was just as joyous after the “fun experience.”

No one on the roster may have enjoyed the vitriol from the Stars’ crowd throughout the Golden Knights’ 4-3 victory Monday night at American Airlines Center and the vigor they showed during a suspenseful finish more than Jonathan Marchessault.

The reigning Conn Smythe Trophy winner used the word “love” to describe how he felt about the Stars’ fans booing Stone every time he touched the puck in his first game in two months since suffering a lacerated spleen.

“It’s business as usual, right?” Marchessault said when asked about how the Golden Knights responded to the Stanley Cup Playoff atmosphere.

Right.

Vegas is back in its element.

The best teams in sports are typically credited with an ability to level up when games matter the most.

The Golden Knights showed they were capable of the phenomenon in last year’s playoffs, where they rose from one of the best teams in the regular season to the NHL’s indisputable top force and dominant champions. Now healthy, back with not only their full complement of players but a trio of reinforcements, the internal aim is to do it again this season.

The external debate was whether it was possible. Score one for the Golden Knights’ believers to start.

Winning 16 games over the next two months to stake their claim as repeat champions is a tall order, but that magic number is now already down to 15. The Western Conference eighth-seeded Golden Knights lead the top-seeded Stars 1-0 in the best-of-seven series after looking a whole lot more like last year’s championship team than this year’s up-and-down, regular-season squad Monday.

Vegas had a gameplan for Dallas, and they executed it en route to becoming the league’s only team to win an opening-round Game 1 on the road this year.

“I thought we played the right way and stuck with it,” Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy said. “We know how to do that…Good teams this time of year tend to not panic in those types of situations and we certainly didn’t.”

The Golden Knights never trailed and were only tied for less than a minute and a half. They captured the scoreboard 83 seconds in when Stone deflected in a shot from defenseman Noah Hanifin, whom the team captain was playing with for the first time ever.

Vegas hoped strong power-play form it found late in the regular season carried over to the playoffs, and Hanifin made sure of it. Not only did he put the Stone goal into motion, but he got credited with another primary power-play assist later in the first period.

On the second one, he saw a split-second opening  out of a faceoff and fired a puck at the net to create a putback opportunity that Hertl converted to make the score 3-1.

Hanifin and Hertl, both trade-deadline acquisitions, seem to have taken to the Golden Knights’ playoff mentality quickly. Hertl was always bound to be a power-play weapon for Vegas, but Cassidy admitted it was a tough decision to place Hanifin on the top unit over Shea Theodore, who’s held down the role for years.

"They’re kind of interchangeable but Hanny for whatever reason lately has found a lane pretty well, ” Cassidy said. “So we’ll keep him there.”

Cassidy was just as impressed by Hanifin’s defense on the top-pairing next to the returning Alex Pietrangelo, who had his appendix removed weeks before the playoffs.

Some of the statistics don’t paint the Golden Knights as having played all that well in Game 1, including the Stars holding a 30-15 advantage as far as shots on goal. In his first playoff start, goalie Logan Thompson “played well,” in Cassidy’s words, and kept the shot margin from biting the Golden Knights.

But it wasn't all him. Vegas’ defense predominantly forced Dallas to the outside, taking away its rush and prompting lower-quality shots from afar.

That’s just how Cassidy schemed it.

“We’re not a shot-volume team,” Cassidy said. “We’re never going to be truly that team that just rips it every time. I think we turned down too many opportunities maybe to play off a shot, get a rebound or recover a puck that way because they were swarming us in the d-zone…Sometimes, you’re ahead and you tend to not attack as much. At the end of the day, those things factor into those totals. I did think we defended well.”  

The hit and block tallies also show an edge in Vegas’ favor from a physicality standpoint. The Golden Knights outdid the Stars 55-29 on the former and 20-15 on the latter.

The willingness Vegas players showed to sacrifice their bodies really came across in the second period. Clinging to a 3-2 lead after late first-period Dallas goals by Jamie Benn and Jason Robertson where the defense let down Thompson in transition, Brayden McNabb took matters into his own.

The veteran defenseman wristed a puck so hard that a couple Stars’ players near its path moved out of the way. The shot found the top-corner of the net to put the Golden Knights back up two goals.

Seconds later, McNabb refused to bail and blocked a shot by Robertson from near point-blank range near the goal on the other end of the ice.

“That’s how we defend,” Hanifin said. “We don’t want to give them inside ice.”

And they didn’t on the Stars’ final goal of the night. With about eight minutes remaining in the game, Thompson made what Cassidy considered his only miscue of the night.

He failed to seal the post and let a far wrist shot from Mason Marchment sneak in the corner to make it a one-goal game. But Thompson redeemed himself just as the crowd came alive for the final several minutes.

The Stars peppered the Golden Knights with shots, including with an extra skater for the final two-and-a-half-minutes after pulling goalie Jake Oettinger, but Thompson turned away the few that got through his defense. Those are the types of tense moments that force a team to rise to the occasion in the playoffs.

The Golden Knights navigated it several times last year, including in a situation highly reminiscent of Monday night's at the conclusion of Game 4 in Stanley Cup Final. The lineup was a bit different in that moment last June, including most notably Adin Hill in net instead of Thompson.

But the way the Golden Knights elevated when they need it most felt the same.

“This is what you play for,” Stone said. “Once the game gets going, you realize why you play. It’s so much fun to be out there.”

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or